Proven Guilty (37 page)

I narrowed my eyes and reached for my Sight.

Before I could use it, my left hand exploded into flame.

Pain, pain, PAIN. Fire, scorching, parboiling my hand as I tried to hold it back with my shield bracelet. The memory of my injury in that vampire-haunted basement came rushing back to me in THX, and my nerve endings were listening.

I fought down a scream, breathing, my teeth snapping together so suddenly and sharply that a fleck of one of my molars chipped away.

It was an illusion
, I told myself.
A memory. It’s a ghost, nothing more. It cannot harm you if you do not allow it to do so
. I pushed hard against that memory, turning the focus of my will against it.

I felt the illusion-memory wobble, and then the pain was gone, the fire out. My body pumped endorphins into my bloodstream a heartbeat later, and I drifted on them as my focus started to collapse. I leaned hard against the table, my left hand held close to my chest in pure reflex, my right supporting my weight. I turned my attention to the envelopes and forced my will against them until the illusions grew translucent. I picked up the real envelope.

Lasciel regarded me steadily, her beautiful face unyielding, determined.

“Sooner or later I’ll push through anything you throw,” I panted. “You know that.”

“Yes,” she said. “But you will not be able to focus on the divination until you are quit of me. I may force you to exhaust yourself resisting me, in which case you will not attempt the divination. Even if I only delay you until dawn, there will be no need for you to attempt it.” She lifted her chin. “Whatever happens, the divination will not be successful.”

I let out a low chuckle, which made Lasciel frown at me. “You missed it,” I said.

“Missed what?”

“The loophole. I can kill myself trying it while you rock the boat. And after all, this entire exercise is nothing more than a suicide attempt in any case. Why not go through with it?”

Her jaw clenched. “You would murder yourself rather than yield to reason?”

“More manslaughter than murder, I’d say.”

“You’re mad,” the fallen angel said.

“Get me some Alka-Seltzer and I’ll foam at the mouth, too.” This time I hit Lasciel with the hard look. “There’s a child out there who needs me. I’d rather die than let her down. I’m doing the spell, period. So fuck off.”

She shook her head in frustration and looked away, frowning. “You are quite likely to die.”

“Broken record much?” I asked. I got out the lock of baby-fine hair, set my knife down on the table, and lit the ceremonial candles there. The fallen angel was correct, dammit. The fear stirred dangerously inside me and my fingers shook hard enough to break the first kitchen match instead of kindling it to life.

“If you must do this,” Lasciel said, “at least attempt to survive it. Let me help you.”

“You can help me by shutting the hell up and going away,” I told her. “Hellfire isn’t going to be any use to me here.”

“Perhaps not,” Lasciel said. “But there is another way.”

There was a shimmer of light in the corner of my eye, and I turned to see a slowly pulsing silver glow upon the floor in the middle of my summoning circle. Two feet beneath it lay the Blackened Denarius where the rest of Lasciel was imprisoned.

“Take up the coin,” she urged me. “I can at least protect you from a backlash. I beg you not to throw your life away.”

I bit my lip.

I didn’t want to die, dammit. And the thought of failing to save Molly was almost worse than death. The holder of one of the thirty ancient silver coins had access to tremendous power. With that kind of boost, I could probably pull the spell off, and even if it went south I could survive it under Lasciel’s protection. Somehow, I knew that if I chose to do it I could get the coin out from under the concrete in only a moment, too.

I stared at the silver glow for a moment.

Then I rolled my eyes and said, “Are you still here?”

Lasciel’s face smoothed into an emotionless mask, but there was a subtle, ugly tone of threat in her voice. “You are much easier to talk to when you are asleep, my host.”

And she was gone.

Fear rattled around inside me. I tried to calm it, but I couldn’t regain my earlier detachment—not until I thought of young Daniel, mangled beneath my wizard Sight, wounded defending his family from something I had sent after them.

I thought of Molly’s brothers and sisters. I thought of her mother, her father. I thought of the laughter, the sheer, joyous, rowdy
life
of Michael’s family.

Then I pinked my fingertip with my ritual knife, touched the lock of baby hair to it, and laid it down within Little Chicago. I used a second drop of blood and an effort of will to touch the circle on the tabletop, closing it up and beginning the spell. I closed my eyes, focusing, murmuring a stream of faux Latin as I reached out to the model and brought it to life.

My senses blurred, and suddenly I was standing on the tabletop, at the model of my own boardinghouse. I thought the silver-colored model had grown to life size at first, then realized that the inverse was more accurate. I had shrunk to scale with Little Chicago, my awareness now within the spell rather than in my own body, which stood over the table like Godzilla, murmuring the words of the spell.

I closed my eyes and thought of Molly, my blood touched upon her lock of hair, and to my utter surprise I shot off down the street with no more effort than it took to peddle a bicycle. The streets beneath me and the buildings around me glowed with white energy, the whole of the place humming like high-power tension lines.

Stars and stones, Little Chicago worked. It worked
well
. A surge of jubilation went through me, and my speed increased in proportion. I flashed through the streets, seeing faint images of people, like ghosts, the unsteady reflections of those now moving through the real Chicago around me. But then the spell wavered, and I found myself moving in a circle like a baffled hound trying to pick up a scent trail.

It didn’t work.

I made an effort and stood back in my own body, staring down at Little Chicago, badly fatigued.

Exhausted, I reached for my backpack, sat down, and fumbled Bob into my lap.

His eyes lit up at once and he said, “Don’t get me wrong, big guy, I like you. But not that way.”

“Shut up,” I growled at him. “Just tried to use Little Chicago to find Molly’s trail. It fizzled.”

Bob blinked. “It worked? The model actually worked? It didn’t explode?”

“Obviously,” I said. “It worked fine. But I used a simple tracking spell, and it couldn’t pick up her trail. So what’s wrong with the damned thing?”

“Put me on the table,” Bob said.

I reached up and did so. He was quiet for a minute before he said, “It’s fine, Harry. I mean, it’s working just fine.”

“Like hell,” I growled. “I’ve done that tracking spell hundreds of times. It must be the model.”

“I’m telling you, it’s perfect,” Bob said. “I’m looking at the darn thing. If it wasn’t your spell, and it wasn’t the model… Hey, what did you use to focus the tracking spell?”

“Lock of her hair.”

“That’s baby hair, Harry.”

“So?”

Bob let out a disgusted sound. “So it won’t work. Harry, babies are like one big enormous blank slate. Molly has changed quite a bit since that lock was taken. She doesn’t have much to do with the person it got snipped from. Naturally the spell couldn’t track her.”

“Dammit!” I snarled. I hadn’t thought of that, but it made sense. I hadn’t ever used a lock of baby hair in the spell before, except once, to find a baby. “Dammit, dammit, dammit.”

A tiny mistake.

I was only human.

And I had failed Molly.

Chapter Thirty-four

I turned away from the table and hauled myself laboriously up the ladder to my living room.

Charity sat on the edge of the couch with her head bowed, her lips moving. As I emerged, she stood up and faced me, tension quivering through her. Thomas, who had a kettle on my little wood-burning stove, glanced over his shoulder.

I shook my head at them.

Charity’s face went white and she slowly sat down again.

I went to the kitchen, found my bottle of aspirin, and chewed up three of them, grimacing at the taste. Then I drank a glass of water. “You make those calls?” I asked Thomas.

“Yeah,” he said. “In fact, Murphy should be here in a minute.”

I nodded at him and walked over to settle into one of the easy chairs by the fireplace with my glass of water, and told Charity, “I thought I could find her. I’m sorry. I…” I shook my head and trailed off into silence.

“Thank you for trying, Mister Dresden,” she said quietly. She didn’t look up.

“It was the baby hair,” I said to Charity. “It didn’t work. Hair was too old. I couldn’t…” I sighed. “Just too tired to think straight, maybe,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

Charity looked up at me. I expected fear, anger, maybe a little bit of contempt in her features. But none of that was there. There was instead something that I’d seen in Michael when the situation was really, really bad. It was a kind of quiet calm, a surety totally at odds with the situation, and I could not fathom its source or substance.

“We will find her,” she told me quietly. “We’ll bring her home.” Her voice held the solid confidence of someone stating a fact as simple and obvious as two plus two is four.

I didn’t quite break out into a bitter laugh. I was too tired to do that. But I shook my head and stared at the empty fireplace.

“Mister Dresden,” she said quietly. “I don’t pretend to know as much about magic as you do. I’m quite certain you have a great deal of power.”

“Just not enough,” I said. “Not enough to do any good.”

In the corner of my eye, I saw Charity actually smile. “It’s difficult for you to realize that you are, at times, as helpless as the rest of us.”

She was probably right, but I didn’t say as much out loud. “I made a mistake, and Molly might be hurt because of it. I don’t know how to live with that.”

“You’re only human,” she said, and there was a trace of pensive reflection in her voice. “For all of your power.”

“That answer isn’t good enough,” I said quietly. I glanced at her, to find her watching me, her dark eyes intent. “Not good enough for Molly.”

“Have you done all that you can to help her?” Charity asked me.

I racked my brain for a useless moment and then said, “Yeah.”

She spread her hands. “Then I can hardly ask you for more.”

I blinked at her. “What?”

She smiled again. “Yes. It surprises me to hear myself say it, as well. I have not been tolerant of you. I have not been pleasant to you.”

I waved a tired hand. “Yeah. But I get why not.”

“I realize that now,” she said. “You saw. But it took all of this to make me see it.”

“See what?”

“That much of the anger I’ve directed at you was not rightfully yours. I was afraid. I let my fear become something that controlled me. That made me harm others. You.” She bowed her head. “And I let it worsen matters with Molly. I feared for her safety so much that I went to war with her. I drove her toward what I most wished her to avoid. All because of my fear. I have been afraid, and I am ashamed.”

“Everyone gets scared sometimes,” I said.

“But I allowed it to rule me. I should have been stronger than that, Mister Dresden. Wiser than that. We all should be. God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of love, of power, and of self-control.”

I absorbed that for a moment. Then I asked, “Are you apologizing to me?”

She arched an eyebrow and then said, her tone wry, “I am not yet that wise.”

That actually did pull a quiet laugh from me.

“Mister Dresden,” she said. “We’ve done all that we can do. Now we pray. We have faith.”

“Faith?” I asked.

She regarded me with calm, confident eyes. “That a hand mightier than yours or mine will shield my daughter. That we will be shown a way. That He will not leave his faithful when they are in need.”

“I’m not all that faithful,” I said.

She smiled again, tired but unwavering. “I have enough for both of us.” She met my eyes steadily and said, “There are other powers than your magic, or that of the dark spirits that oppose us. We are not alone in this fight, Mister Dresden. We need not be afraid.”

I averted my eyes before a soulgaze could get going. And before she could see them tear up. Charity, regardless of how she’d treated me in the past, had been there when the chips were down. She’d cared for me when I’d been injured. She’d supported me when she didn’t have to do so. As abrasive, accusatory, and harsh as she could be, I had never for an instant doubted her love for her husband, for her children, or the sincerity of her faith. I’d never liked her too much—but I had always respected her.

Now more than ever.

I just hoped she was right, when she said we weren’t in this alone. I wasn’t sure I really believed that, deep down. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve got nothing against God, except for maybe wishing He was a little less ambiguous and had better taste in hired help. People like Michael and Charity and, to a lesser extent, Murphy, had made me take some kind of faith under consideration, now and again. But I wasn’t the sort of guy who did well when it came to matters of belief. And I wasn’t the sort of guy who I thought God would really want hanging around his house or his people.

Hell. There was a fallen angel in my brain. I counted myself lucky that I hadn’t met Michael or one of the other Knights from the business end of one of the Swords.

I looked at the gift popcorn tin in the corner by the door, where my staff and rod were settled, along with my practice fighting staff, an unearned double of my wizardly tool, my sword cane, an umbrella, and the wooden cane sheath of
Fidelacchius
, one of the three swords borne by Michael and his brothers in arms.

The sword’s last wielder had told me that I was to keep it and pass it on to the next Knight. He said I would know who, and when. And then the sword sat there in my popcorn tin for years. When my house had been in-vaded by bad guys, they’d overlooked it. Thomas, who had lived with me for almost two years, had never touched it or commented on it. I wasn’t sure that he’d ever noticed it, either. It just sat there, waiting.